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Yahoo #1, Bing #1, Google not in top 50 ? Whyyy????

I'm wondering if one of you SEO gurus could please offer even the smallest amount of advise or direction here. I'm working on a website for company I have recently become involved with. I am tying to rescue their organic search traffic which literally halved on 27th Sept (Panda #20 release, thanks SEOmoz Algorithm change history :-)) last year then halved again around 21st December (Panda #23).

Lots of keywords were hit. I've managed to rescue most of them but one is eluding me and is so bad that it's ranked #1 in Yahoo and Bing but not in TOP 50 in Google. Arrrgghhh!!!!

The site has a lot of junky back links which I would love to fix but haven't had a chance to address. Time for SEO is very sparse and my SEO knowledge is fairly basic but I do know enough to know that something is wrong.

The page in question is here - http://www.mxstore.com.au/motocross-gear.html

The keyword is fairly obvious.

Now it managed to scrape its way back to page 1 (#9) a few weeks back with some simple on page SEO and a huge cull of duplicate content on the site. I then made the Rookie error of trying to step things up and changed the URL from riding-gear.html to direct match motocross-gear.html. I 301'd the old URL and the redirect worked fine. A few days later and we were gone again. It could have been a co-incidence I guess.

There really is very poor competition for that keyword. While the on-page SEO at the url above or even the homepage is not fantastic it is certainly better than 95% of the top 50. As mentioned the site is ranking #1 for the same keyword in Yahoo and Bing, although I just noticed it's the homepage which is ranking, not the URL which Google latched onto a few weeks back. The site is ranking #1 in Google for some keywords with the woooorst on-page SEO so it would appear the domain has some authority so.....

Why, WHYYYY. Is the site sitting out of the Top 50 for Motocross Gear. This issue seems to be above my knowledge base and I honestly don't even know where to start. Could it be the junk link campaign turning Goggle off?

Thanks in advance guys, I really would appreciate even the smallest amount of direction here.

have you seen this for all keywords? If so then it is definitely a penalty but if you are seeing the dramatic drop in rankings for just the keywords that have been heavily built to then these links have probably been devalued by google and you need to start a clean-up of the backlink profile very quickly!!

Did you do any spamming, comments blasts, something like that recently?

I would have a look onto on-page seo actually. You have a shop, it means no text content, just a list of products. Try adding descriptive text which is more related to your keyword. 'We know what you want!" - that is not related for sure.

Any hints from google tools regarding your website by the way? You are missing robots.txt and sitemap.xml, I suggest adding those (will not help solving this issue, but still).

The big question is if you need to file a reconsideration request. Did you receive any messages in Google Webmaster Tools? If not, you may want to file a request just to see Google's response. Often they will verify this way if a site has received a manual penalty or not.

Understand that Google's reconsideration process can be a several month process. It's best to try to remove as many links as you can - (and show a serious effort to do so) and use the disavow tool as a measure of last resort.

Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the number one thing that helps after you've cleaned up bad links, is building good links. :)

Keep us up to date on your progress. With some work and due diligence, your site may come out of this fine."

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